James LaBrie On "Dream Theater"

Dream Theater frontman James LaBrie recently gave an interview to the Aquarian Weekly, where he discussed the band's new self-titled studio album as well as his recently released solo disc, Impermanent Resonance.

Says LaBrie about the Dream Theater album's 22-minute closing track, "Illumination Theory," "[It's] this big, epic 20-minute-plus, but what it does is it just incorporates all these things that really make Dream Theater who they are; it really identifies strongly with the kind of band we are. It’s aggressive, it’s very symphonic at times, it’s very atmospheric at times. This is the first time where in the middle of an instrumental, we didn’t all of a sudden go into this big, interactive display of musical and instrumental prowess. What happened was the whole thing just kind of disappears—the whole band disappears—and all of a sudden Jordan [Rudess, keyboards] comes in with this big, atmospheric approach, followed by a very symphonic string section, very melodically-driven, and then going into something that feels like a meteorite hit the planet, you know, if you go into the section called 'The Pursuit of Truth,' where I’m like, screaming my head off and everything like that. I mean, it’s a very exciting ride and it’s a classic, epic piece for Dream Theater."

According to LaBrie, "[Before] going into the album, we knew that it was going to be a self-titled album just because we felt that we just walked over a bridge, so to speak. With A Dramatic Turn of Events, that album was more or less about us letting everyone know that we are still the same band and we’re going to continue to write music and not lose our identity, but the music is going to be where it’s at, that we haven’t lost a thing; if anything, we feel better about ourselves. So that album was more or less about proving it to our fans and to the journalists around the world that we still are who we are and in fact, we feel even that much more confident.

"So with that being done, this album was more or less about us just remembering and saying, 'You know what, we’ve done that, we’ve proven that, let’s just get back into having a great time together and writing an amazing album and that we can say this is the beginning of something new for us.' This is a whole new chapter in Dream Theater’s career that we feel this album will be the kick-start to that. So yeah, going in we just knew this was the album we needed to write, and I think we achieved it."